Mick's GeekBlog

Thinking

Posted by Mick on April 7, 2010 – 10:14 pm

I was laying in bed this evening, having a bit of a rest before hitting the keyboard, and I thought. That’s what I do, I think.

Matt and I were talking a few days ago. We do that. We talk. About deep matters relating to philosophical truths. We decided that people who don’t think are often times happier than people who do think. Deep philosophical truths are depressing.

Tonight, I was thinking, and I wondered. Wondering is technically thinking, but it’s a genre of thinking. The activity of thinking is split into numerous genres. Wondering is not when you think about something, like rolling your eyes back in your head, so only the whites are showing. When you start thinking like this- why can some people do that better than others, is that a learned skill, something you can practice, or is it a genetic thing, like rolling your tongue, where some people are physically incapable of doing it- then, my friend, then you’re wondering.

By the way, I looked that up on Google, and a quick 5 minute search turns up nothing definitive. A few people say you can do it if youpractice, a few say you can’t, and I don’t really want to work that hard on it to find out myself.

Yes, I understand that trying to roll my eyes back in my head a few times a day for a few weeks doesn’t really meet the criteria for the phrase “work that hard”. In my case it does. The doing is easy. I can do that, no problem. I just did it. It’s not pleasant, but it’s easy work. What’s hard is remembering to do it. I’d need to follow a schedule. A timer would have to be involved, because I absolutely will not remember to do this.

How hard is it to set a timer? It’s not hard. I can do that, no problem. And then the alarm goes off when I’m in a group of people, I look at it, and I start rolling my eyes back in my head. Yes, I would have to do it right at that moment, because if I didn’t, I’d forget it, and then I missed a practice and the results of my experiment would be invalidated. Now I’m the “weird guy”. At the very least, I have to explain why I’m rolling my eyes back in my head. At a timed interval. Which leads to the entire story I just told you. And there’s always some douchebag who sneers at you as he says something about how people will waste their time on the silliest things. And then I have to kick his ass.